1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to contests, ranking, and review of content and specifically relates to systems and methods for creating, hosting and/or distributing automated contests, rankings and reviews of content.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are few effective paths for producers of content to receive expert reviews of their works, whether the content is audio-visual (movies, music, books, scripts, etc.), products (food, cloths, wine, electronics, toys, etc.), or services (employee evaluations, tests, etc.) Similarly, outside of extensive demographic research, it is difficult for producers of content to obtain marketing research and consumer feedback data about their works. Moreover, no system exists to provide automated contests, rankings and expert reviews in a system accessible to producers of content, industry experts, and/or consumer end-users over a network such as the Internet.
Content producers frequently seek to conduct online promotions of media content inviting interactions with end-users such as purchases, forms, polls, discussions and the like. Ordinarily, a service provider, who links the content producer with consumer end-users over a network, develops static means to distribute content. Interactive capabilities for existing service providers require extensive programming by each service provider and by each content producer who wishes to distribute content. Large existing content providers, Internet content distribution sites, and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks each have distinct disadvantages.
For example, content distribution companies cannot easily find the best new artists, authors or producers of content using existing methods. Reciprocally, consumer end-users of content cannot easily find the best content, be it music, books, movies, or other creative works in any particular genre. Similarly, consumer end-users cannot readily find widespread objective reviews of products or content.
In the music industry, for example, artists generally need large content distribution companies to market and distribute their content. However, it is difficult for most artists to get the attention of the people in the industry who can start this process. Artist and Repertoire (A&R) personnel usually receive more unsolicited submissions than they have time to review, and ask that artists submit content through a qualified music industry professional such as an agent, manager or attorney. The costs of hiring such representatives are prohibitive for most new artists. In most cases, an artist who sends a demo to an industry professional will get no attention. Unsolicited content from artists or unsolicited products is also a problem for industry professionals. These professionals generally do not have the time and resources to wade through a large undifferentiated volume of unsolicited materials to find the few worthy of investment.
A provider is, for example, a web site operator, an Internet service provider, an online promotions manager, an interactive television producer, a kiosk provider, a game console provider, a set-top box provider, and the like. Content is created by a content producer, such as, for example, an artist, author, designer, and the like. It is foreseen that a service provider can be a content producer.
Some interactive operations such as web-polls, media ratings, purchases through electronic “shopping carts”, or interactive discussion forums are available to providers from third parties. A provider can, for example, subscribe to a web-poll created by a third party, for example, to provide a simple poll of the provider's end-users for marketing, trivia, entertainment, research purposes, and the like. A web poll is an interactive operation where the responses are collected and ranked by frequency or are compared with a predetermined correct answer. However, current web-poll interactive operations do not simultaneously allow for flexible media content, such as videos, audio, or virtually any playable content, do not allow for adjustable scoring mechanisms, do not allow for registered end-users, do not allow for multiple round contests such as elimination contests, do not allow for scorekeeping among end-users, do not allow for demographic correlation and marketing data interpolation, do not allow for concurrent sweepstakes based on web poll voting, and do not allow for complete customization of the interactive operation elements to be provided by the third party to the provider.
A provider can similarly subscribe to a third party shopping-cart in order to provide standardized electronic commerce functionality (purchases, product information, returns, and the like) for the end-users of the provider's service. However, in addition to lacking those elements described above, shopping-cart interactive operations provided by third party systems do not provide for interactive, customizable non-purchase content and statistics, individual end-user information for interactive content. Such existing systems fail to provide cross-correlated content, demographic information, sweepstakes correlated to end-user selections, and end-user voting on media content, purchase items, and the like wherein the voting can be correlated to marketing, sweepstakes, and demographic information.
Similarly, a number of companies have attempted to provide a central location for content providers, such as new artists, to distribute their content via a global telecommunications network such as the Internet. But these companies do not typically provide access to industry professionals at all, nor do these companies provide much assistance to consumer users or fans or enlist their services to gather useful feedback. To the extent current companies rank content by popularity (based on, for example, the number of votes, number of downloads, or number of web-site “hits”), these rankings are subject to ballot-stuffing and voting by a non-representative set of listeners. Furthermore, Internet content distribution sites often feature the music of so many artists that only a few can receive a significant share of the attention. For example, at one point Mp3.com, an Internet content distribution site focusing on music, hosted over 500,000 songs and 80,000 artists in its database. Thus, very few songs or artists could be featured or popularized.
In addition, ranking content popularity by the number of downloads or streams selected off a site is ineffective as it is easy to inflate a ranking if the same person performs multiple downloads using available software. This problem is aggravated by the fact that, once such an artificially ranked song attains a high ranking, it is likely to be downloaded or streamed by future visitors, who prolong the effect of the artificially high ranking. As a result, consumer end-users cannot find the best content and express their opinion in an effective manner, industry experts cannot find the best producers of content for development, and producers of content do not have an efficient means for marketing, distributing and receiving feedback on their works from experts, other content producers, and end-users.